Operation Trace: The Missing Women of Ireland's Vanishing Triangle

This episode includes discussions of sexual assault and murder.

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Have you ever seen a cloud and thought it looked just like a horse or a ballerina, or noticed a pattern in wood grain that looks an awful lot like a face?

This phenomenon has a name, patternicity, the human tendency to find patterns and otherwise random or meaningless information.

And it doesn't just make us see shapes.

Sometimes we spot trends that don't exist.

Like assuming a lucky shirt helped our favorite team win a game when in reality, it's just a coincidence.

The thing is, it can be tricky to convince a person that these patterns aren't real, thanks to another phenomenon called confirmation bias.

That's our tendency to look for evidence to support the conclusions we've already drawn while disregarding any conflicting evidence.

So imagine you're a police officer investigating a crime.

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It's not like you're doing this on purpose, it's just the way our brains work.

It's human nature to want to apply order to chaos, to make someone's story have a satisfying arc.

But sometimes, our desire for everything to fit together can lead us astray, and tidy narratives can overshadow the truth.

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It's 1993.

26-year-old Annie McCarrick and her two roommates live in a quiet quiet neighborhood just outside Dublin, Ireland.

Annie is from the United States, but she has Irish heritage and went to college in Ireland.

She moved back to New York for a while, then returned to the Dublin area in January 1993.

She wants to get in touch with her roots and maybe settle down in the Emerald Isle permanently.

That's her long-term goal anyway, but in the short term, Annie is celebrating.

Her birthday just passed and she's planning to have a dinner party at her apartment on March 27th.

The day before the party, Annie's busy getting everything ready.

She swings by the bank, then the grocery store to pick up food.

Before she heads home, she stops at a payphone to call a friend who invites her to go on a walk in the nearby Wicklow Mountains.

The friend says she can't make it.

Annie makes a few other calls and soon heads back to her apartment, goes inside, and sets down the groceries.

Then, for some reason, she turns around and walks out again, without putting anything away.

Which is concerning.

There's cream, butter, and other perishables that should be refrigerated.

But she's apparently in such a hurry that she leaves out all the food she just bought to possibly go to waste.

Or she thinks she's coming right back.

Soon after this, around 3.30 p.m., Another friend spots Annie boarding a bus in Dublin.

It runs to a small town called Enniscarry.

Annie has visited Ennis Carrie in the past.

It's not far from the Wicklow Mountains, so if she still plans to go for a walk, it makes sense to go this way.

There's a gap in the timeline for the next five and a half hours until 9 p.m.

That's when witnesses spot someone matching Annie's description at a pub about three miles outside of Enniscarry.

It's a touristy spot called Johnny Fox's.

Numerous witnesses say they saw this woman with an unidentified man.

He's clean-shaven and well-dressed.

The bouncer at Johnny Fox's describes him as a, quote, yuppie.

Annie has never said anything to her friends and family about having a boyfriend, but whoever this woman is who looks just like Annie seems to be on a date.

The yuppie guy meets her outside the pub, pays her cover, and buys her drinks for the rest of the night.

The next day, Annie's friends show up at her apartment for the big birthday dinner.

But when they knock, no one answers.

Annie's not home.

Around the same time, her roommates get back from a weekend away.

They go inside and find the apartment in disarray.

The spoiled groceries are still sitting out, and so is the ironing board and the phone book.

It looks like Annie was halfway through her chores when she dropped everything and left.

Unnerved, Annie's friends call her father John in the United States to let him know what's going on.

John's alarm bells go off immediately.

He knows his daughter.

Even from across the Atlantic Ocean, she's always easy to reach.

She wouldn't just take off or suddenly stop communicating with the people she loves.

Plus, John's a former police officer, so he knows how crucial it is to move quickly after someone goes missing.

Right away, he and Annie's mother Nancy get on a plane to Ireland.

By March 30th, four days after Annie was last seen, she's officially reported missing.

The Irish police, called the Guardi, are on the case.

And on the advice of the American Embassy, the McCarricks hire a private detective.

The investigators chase a couple leads that go nowhere.

Witnesses claim they've seen Annie in other parts of Ireland, but the Guardi can't confirm the sightings.

They also aren't able to determine the identity of the man at Johnny Fox's pub.

Weeks go by with no breaks.

John and Nancy's biggest goal is to hold the investigators' feet to the fire.

It's horrible for their daughter to go missing, and it would be even worse for the case to go cold.

They keep the pressure on by making sure Annie's story stays in the news.

One evening, sometime around early May, a report about Annie's disappearance airs on TV.

She's been missing for a little over a month.

A local woman named Colette McCann catches the broadcast and thinks to herself, What an unimaginable thing to go through.

She has no idea that just a few months later, she'll know exactly how the McCarricks feel.

On July 25th, 1993, Colette attends a family gathering in the Dublin area.

Her sister, Eva Brennan, is also there.

Eva is a devout Catholic who's really involved with her church.

She's 5'7 ⁇ with short brown hair.

She's 39 years old, but her family says she looks younger.

It's not a perfect match, but she kind of looks like Annie McCarrick.

For dinner, Eva and Colette's mother serves lamb, but Eva's not a fan, and that causes some problems.

After Eva complains about the food, it sparks an argument that leads to Eva storming out of the house.

Eva's family worries about her, especially after she doesn't reach out again for the rest of the night or the next morning.

She usually drops by to visit every day, but they just don't hear from her.

Eva's father goes to her apartment to check on her.

When she doesn't answer the front door, he breaks a window and lets himself inside.

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Inside Eva Brennan's apartment, her father finds her jacket, the one she was wearing the night before at dinner when they got into an argument.

But Eva's not there.

Other than the window he broke to get in, there are no signs of forced entry or any kind of struggle.

Eva's father immediately reports her missing, but the police say she's an adult who can take care of herself.

It takes multiple follow-ups before the Gardy agree to investigate.

And when they do, They don't find anything.

Eva is never seen again.

Her sister Colette can't help but notice the similarities between Eva's case and Annie McCarrick's.

Two tallish, young-looking brunette women go missing from the same area within just a few months of each other.

It could be a coincidence, but Colette keeps wondering if the cases are related.

She goes to the police and asks some of the questions that have been keeping her up at night.

What if Eva and Annie were murdered?

And what if the same person killed them?

The police dismiss the idea outright for a couple of reasons.

First, they consider Annie and Eva missing.

There's no evidence they were met with foul play.

Officials still think it's possible they ran away or got lost.

But Colette's theory starts to seem more credible after another victim goes missing.

Her name is JoJo Dullard.

She's 21 years old and grew up in rural Ireland.

After she was orphaned at a young age, her sisters raised her.

For a while, she worked as a beautician in Dublin, then decided the job wasn't for her.

But she still goes back to the city every once in a while.

Like on November 9th, 1995, when she goes to visit a few bars with friends.

She's supposed to take a bus home, but she misses the last one and decides to hitchhike instead.

Jojo's last known location is a town called Moon, roughly 45 miles outside of Dublin.

She uses a payphone to call a friend at 11.37 11.37pm and ends the conversation by saying, quote, oh, a car is coming and I have to go now.

She misses a shift at work the next day and her family reports her missing shortly after.

But once again, the Gardy don't respond in a timely manner.

It takes them three days to start looking.

When they finally do launch an investigation, they seem to take it seriously, interviewing countless potential witnesses.

But they don't get any leads.

The trail is already cold.

A short while later, Annie McCarrick's father John gives an interview where he comments on the parallels between JoJo's case, his daughter's, and another disappearance.

He doesn't say exactly who, but it's possible he's talking about Eva Brennan.

John references a triangular region surrounding Dublin, which stretches north from JoJo's last known location and along Ireland's eastern shoreline where Annie and Eva disappeared.

It's unclear if John actually calls the area Ireland's Vanishing Triangle.

If he does, he might be the one who coins the term.

But regardless, the name Ireland's Vanishing Triangle eventually gets repeated in newspapers, radio shows, and TV broadcasts.

The idea of a vanishing triangle becomes part of Dublin's local folklore, something many people know about, but no one's sure where they heard it from.

Now, the Gardy haven't given any indication that they believe these disappearances are connected, but the press keeps running with the narrative that they are.

They even go so far as to speculate about a possible serial killer in the area.

They are the kinds of headlines that sell papers.

The theory makes sense to some of the missing's loved ones, but at the same time, three disappearances in four years isn't statistically unusual for a city like Dublin.

In her book, The Vanishing Triangle, The Murdered Women Ireland Forgot, author Claire McGowan points out that in any given year, nearly 9,000 people are reported missing in Ireland.

About one in 10 of those cases will ultimately go unsolved.

In fact, in the four years before Annie McCarrick went missing, four other women were killed or disappeared in the Dublin area.

But almost no one includes those cases in the so-called vanishing triangle.

There doesn't appear to be a clear or strong reason why certain cases are included and others aren't.

All this to say, the fact that Annie, Eva, and Jojo all disappeared in the same region around the same time isn't necessarily evidence of an active serial killer.

This could be an example of patternicity leading people to false conclusions and confirmation bias reinforcing those beliefs.

The whole Ireland's Vanishing Triangle narrative might be little more than misinformation.

But it's complicated.

Because in a lot of ways, it's helpful misinformation.

The name alone keeps all the stories in the headlines and raises awareness for the victims, which is important because after John's interview, the number of victims continues to rise.

In August 1996, 25-year-old Fiona Pender leaves her flat and doesn't come home.

Six months later, on February 13th, 1997, teenager Kira Breen sneaks out of her bedroom at night and never returns.

The following February, 19-year-old Fiona Sinek goes out drinking with friends.

She calls her ex-boyfriend at some point who walks her home, but he's the last person to ever see her.

Just five months later, on January 28th, 18-year-old Deirdre Jacob visits her parents in her hometown of Newbridge.

It's about an hour outside of Dublin, inside the Vanishing Triangle.

Deirdre is supposed to return to college in London in the fall, so she swings by the bank and withdraws money to pay for her next semester's rent.

Then, she drops by the post office before visiting her grandmother.

Security cameras all over town film her running errands.

Deirdre's on her way back to her parents' house around 3.30 p.m.

At least eight witnesses see her walking down the street.

She's only yards from home, but she never makes it.

A few hours later, Deirdre's mother returns from work and finds the house empty.

She sounds the alarm and the guardies spring into action.

This could be the break they've been looking for.

Many of the other vanishing triangle victims weren't investigated until a day or more after they went missing.

But Deirdre's trail is still fresh.

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Unlike some other cases within Ireland's Vanishing Triangle, the Gardy respond to 18-year-old Deirdre Jacobs' disappearance immediately.

But their initial investigation proves just as fruitless as all the others.

Nobody saw what happened to Deirdre in those final yards.

Somehow she disappeared right off the street, right by her house in broad daylight.

It comes as a shock to a lot of people and the news spreads fast.

The coverage might be part of the reason why, in September 1998, the Guardi finally decide they need to do something different.

They form a task force called Operation Trace.

Instead of treating each disappearance as an isolated event, Trace's mission is to look for patterns, to try to see if some common denominator unites the victims.

They focus on six of the missing women.

all but one of the victims we've discussed in this episode.

It's not clear which one is left out because different newspapers print different names.

Most of the reports don't include Eva Brennan, the woman who disappeared after a dinner argument with her mother.

Presumably that's because she was 39 years old while the rest of the victims were younger, either teenagers or in their 20s.

But that's not certain.

Even the detectives assigned to Operation Trace don't know why some missing women are included and others aren't.

The women who do make the cut are all relatively young, white, female, and conventionally attractive.

Each one went missing within an 80-mile radius of Dublin between 1993 and 1998.

None of them had any known reason why they'd want to run away.

And that's it.

They don't share a hair or eye color.

Some disappeared off the street, others from their homes.

Some went missing at night, some during the day.

One of the victims was seven months pregnant.

There isn't much to go off of, but there's enough for Operation Trace to develop some theories.

And unlike some earlier investigations, they believe foul play definitely occurred, and they identify some persons of interest.

One of them is a carpenter named Larry Murphy.

At the time of the disappearances, he was in his 30s.

He was clean-cut, married, and to all appearances, an ordinary guy.

In 1993, when Annie McCarrick went missing, he lived in Enniskerry, the the same town where she presumably visited right before she disappeared.

He also worked for Deidre Jacobs' grandmother, and a man fitting his description was filmed on a CCTV camera at the bank Deidre visited the day she went missing.

News reports also say he's been linked to Jojo Dullard's case, although it's not clear exactly how.

Now, Ireland is a small country.

At the time of the disappearances, the population was around 3.5 million.

It could be a coincidence that Murphy lived near one victim and seemingly knew two others.

But in February 2000, Larry Murphy starts looking a lot more suspicious.

He apparently starts stalking a young woman whose identity hasn't been made public.

One day, he drives to her workplace, which is inside the vanishing triangle.

He parks near her usual spot, and when she walks past his car, he grabs her, beats her, and forces her into his trunk.

Then, he drives into the Wicklow Mountains, sexually assaults her, and attempts to murder her.

He is interrupted by a pair of hunters who stumble upon the scene and rescue the young woman.

Murphy is sentenced to 15 years in prison.

At some point, reporters start drawing connections.

The abduction feels eerily similar to the Vanishing Triangle cases.

If he snatched this victim right off the street, maybe he did the same to Annie, Jojo, Deirdre, and or the others.

Even more alarming, while he's incarcerated, at least two other inmates reportedly hear him bragging about getting away with murder.

Eventually, the Guardi named Larry a person of interest in all the Operation Trace disappearances, plus a couple more.

At one point, they invite FBI profilers from the U.S.

to examine the evidence.

The agents agree that Murphy fits the profile of a serial killer.

To them, the efficiency with which he kidnapped that young woman suggests he'd done something like it before.

But still, it's only circumstantial evidence.

The Guardi can't convict Murphy on the inmates' testimony or the FBI's profile.

They don't have concrete proof he had anything to do with the Vanishing Triangle cases.

They never arrest Murphy or press charges due to lack of evidence.

According to police, their investigation suggests that it's more likely some or all of the victims were kidnapped or killed by someone they knew, which does fit with global statistics.

In any country, women are far more likely to be killed by someone they've met rather than a stranger.

Take, for example, the case of Kira Breen.

She's the teenager who snuck out of her bedroom window late at night.

The guardi suspect she met a man in his 30s for a date that night and he killed her.

They questioned this man repeatedly and arrested him twice, but he died of an overdose in police custody in 2017, and officials never received the answers they were looking for.

In the end, the officers of Operation Trace never make a single arrest related to any of the cases within the Vanishing Triangle.

According to Detective Alan Bailey, who was assigned to Operation Trace, the only conclusion they've reached is that they are not able to tie all the disappearances to a single serial killer.

The task force disbands in 2003.

But that's not the end of the investigation.

The Guardians still field tips.

Over the years, they've followed up on a number of leads and questioned various persons of interest.

Some of the disappearances have been reclassified as no-body homicides.

As of this recording, none of the victims' remains have been recovered.

But there have been some really recent breakthroughs.

Let's go back to the first disappearance described in this episode.

Witnesses saw Annie McCarrick board a bus to Ennis Carey around 3.30 p.m.

on the day of her disappearance.

We don't know what she did for the next five and a half hours, but like I said, a woman matching her description was spotted at Johnny Fox's pub that night around 9 p.m.

A lot of people assumed that woman was Annie.

Almost no one questioned it.

But in 2020, a private investigator working for Annie's family said he believes that woman wasn't her.

Instead, based on a new tip and a corroborating witness, the Gardy think Annie might have actually gone to a cafe in Ennis Carry where she met with a man who bought her a slice of cake.

In their statements, the Gardy and the PI make this sound like a huge discovery.

It seems like this information might have led them to a new suspect, but they haven't released his name publicly yet.

Another tip, the details of which haven't yet been made public, spurred the Gardy to formally reclassify Annie's disappearance as a homicide.

There have also been updates in the case of Jojo Dullard, who went missing after a night out with her friends.

In 2020, on the 25th anniversary of her disappearance, the Guardi announced her death is being investigated as a homicide.

Almost exactly four years later, in November 2024, a man in his 50s was arrested on suspicion of her murder.

The Guardi didn't release his name, but did say they're conducting searches in the Wicklow and Kildare areas.

After two days of questioning, the man was released without charge.

Police say the information helped their investigation, but there have been no further updates as of this recording.

For the families of the victims, it's likely frustrating to have no answers after all this time, but it's encouraging that the police are still investigating these cases 30 years later.

Which means, connected or not, they can still be solved.

These women can still receive justice.

Thank you for tuning in to Serial Killers.

We're here with a new episode every Monday.

Be sure to check us out on Instagram at Serial Killers Podcast.

And if you're tuning in on Spotify, swipe up and give us your thoughts.

Or email us at serialkillersstories at spotify.com.

For more information, amongst the many sources we used, we found Claire McGowan's book, The Vanishing Triangle, The Murdered Women Ireland Forgot, and reporting from the Irish Times extremely helpful to our research.

Stay safe out there.

This episode was written by Angela Jorgensen, edited by Karis Allen and Connor Sampson, researched by Brian Petrus, fact-checked by Haley Milliken, video edited by Spencer Howard, and sound designed by Alex Button.

I'm your host, Janice Morgan.